October 29, 2018 AT 11:00 am

NIVA Researchers Photograph Seaweeds with Drones #drone #droneday

It is a surprisingly nice and calm summer day at Søre Sunnmøre, by the outermost islands of Western Norway. While off-piste hippies are still skiing on the very last summer snow further in the fjords, the kayak season has already started out here, in a silent bay close to Fosnavåg. But it is not all peaceful. A buzzing noise is heard from above; a massive drone is flying systematically along the shoreline. By the shore, a man is standing with seaweeds to his knees, holding in his arms a rack taller than himself.

With a drone for the first time
The man is marine biologist Kasper Hancke from the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA). He is here to photograph a section of nature that most of us usually don’t see – the zone between the low and high tide.

– Usually, when we are mapping the tidal zone, we do the registration manually: Spiral wrack, bladder wrack, knotted wrack, toothed wrack, and so on. But now we try, for the first time, to take pictures from above instead, says Hancke.

– When the drone flies 100 meters above the ground, it takes pictures with a 3 x 3 cm resolution. This offers 1,000 times better image resolution, or one million times more data points, than satellite images, which often have a 30 x 30 m resolution.

Hancke is convinced that drones are the future for mapping and monitoring of nature and natural resources.

Welcome to drone day on the Adafruit blog. Every Monday we deliver the latest news, products and more from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), quadcopter and drone communities. Drones can be used for video & photography (dronies), civil applications, policing, farming, firefighting, military and non-military security work, such as surveillance of pipelines. Previous posts can be found via the #drone tag and our drone / UAV categories.

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